And that’s just over the last 20 years, and “just” when it comes to discrimination and inequities concerning Black Americans. According to a new report from Citi Corp’s GPS group (Global Perspectives and Solutions), nearly sixteen TRILLION dollars have been lost. You can read the full report HERE.
Titled “Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps: The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the U.S.,” the report begins by quoting one of the most famous passages from MLK, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail:” “We are all caught in an inescapable net of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” And, really, it’s not all that indirect.
The report focuses on four areas, three of which I’ve written about on this site. (1) The Racial Wealth Gap: The overall wealth gap has grown to absolutely astonishing proportions since 1965, but the racial wealth gap is even worse. Closing that gap could have added $2.7 trillion in income, or .2% to our GDP per year.
(2) Home Ownership: Improve access to housing credit and 770,000 Black-owned homes might have been added since 2000, a gain of $218 billion in sales and expenditures. Lack of home ownership is the single greatest driver of the racial wealth gap. (3) Education: Facilitating access to higher education could have added $90 to $113 billion to lifetime incomes. Instead inequities in education are still rampant across the nation. And (4) Fair and Equitable Lending to Black Entrepreneurs: This could have generated $13 trillion, plus created 6.1 million jobs per years. ***
Sixteen trillion is nearly 75% of the U.S.’s 2019 GDP, but even the four areas above comprising the report’s core don’t tell the whole story of loss. The report touches on policing, imprisonment, healthcare, and more, and even includes an overview of the Civil Rights Movement as a way to add context and to search for causes of the racial crises which continue to plague us. Mental and physical sickness, lives traumatized, lives lost—add these as the direct result of unequal policing, unfair imprisonment, and health care inequities and the price soars well, well past $16 trillion dollars. There’s also much more to pile on, like Voter Suppression, which also costs us a lot.
It’s good to have all these inequities quantified, with dollar signs attached to many of them. The Clinton campaign coined the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” and we seem to listen more when it comes to pocket-book metrics. But, of course, many don’t experience these inequities, and many don’t believe they exist. We’re still a nation divided, largely unaware of each other’s experience of life, which is one reason the report concludes that bias and systemic racism have blocked substantial improvement over not just the past 20 years, but over the 158 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, and the centuries more since the first African slave landed on American soil.
In his TED Talk “How Racism Makes Us Sick,” public health sociologist Dr. David R. Williams explains a metric that can help us gauge and understand how racism affects the daily health and shortens the lives of so many people of color. It’s an ultimately uplifting talk, full of “we-can-do-it” optimism, but I believe there’s also an ominous undertone. If we don’t overcome bias and systemic racism—and we haven’t been doing a great job of it so far—then racism won’t continue to make just Blacks and other people of color sick. It will continue to make our entire people, and our nation’s morals and body politic sick, too. And it will continue to rob us of so many life-affirming, life-enriching friendships we could be having across racial and ethnic lines. Sixteen trillion dollars doesn’t begin to convey the magnitude of such loss.
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*** I have written a lot about the first three partly because our family foundation, Emmanuel House—now The Neighbor Project—focuses on home ownership, the single greatest driver of the racial wealth gap. The stability created by home ownership boosts high school graduation rates by 25%, and college graduation rates by 116%. The best introduction to The Neighbor Project’s work and vision is executive director Rick Guzman’s talk “Every Person’s God Given Ability to Contribute,” in which he, too, uses the MLK, Jr. passage that begins the Citi Corp report. But home ownership is all over this site, even including a review of the Christmas classic It’s A Wonderful Life, or a profile of Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun. In his talk Rick Guzman also mentions the opening of the Financial Empowerment Center, a joint venture of The Neighbor Project and the City of Aurora, Illinois, which we hope will make inroads into more fair and equitable lending as well.
♦ Go to the TEACHING DIVERSITY page.
Ray Charles Radio on Pandora
And Ray Charles was shot down
But he got up and did his very best
A crowd of people gathered round
And to the question he answered “yes”
These are typically enigmatic Van Morrison lyrics, the kind Ray Charles never wrote and hardly ever sang. Van’s lyrics almost seem to make sense, but their mystery invite you to make your own sense. Why was Ray Charles shot down? And what question did he answer Yes to? To me, Ray Charles was shot down because his music seems the most old-fashioned of all the music played on this Pandora station. The question was, You belong somewhere else, don’t you? Paradoxically, Ray Charles is the most out of place musician on Ray Charles Radio, even more out of place than Hawaii’s Israel Kamakawiwo’ole.
As pretty as you are,
You know you could have been a flower.
If good looks were a minute,
You know you would have been an hour.
Ray’s more likely to be singing lines like in his “Hard Times”:
My mother told me, before she passed away
Son, when I’m gone, don’t forget to pray
Cause there’ll be hard time, hard times
And who knows better than I.
His rhythms are chunkier and his voice—grittier than anyone else’s—often feels like despair, conveying a dread matched only by The Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs, once described as having a voice sounding like he was picking his way through a mine field. Still, no one on Ray Charles Radio shouts and growls like Ray, not even James Brown, who seems to shout for different reasons. And when Charles does turn gentler, he’s almost always singing Country music. Country! “Together Again,” “Worried Mind,” “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Or his marvelous, surprising version of “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” from the hit Broadway show Oklahoma. Oklahoma!
Ray Charles was in the very first class inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. It’s partly for making blues and Gospel so integral to rock. And when he moved on, so to speak, he re-made Country music by infusing more blues and Gospel into it than it ever had. Country music is usually considered white, though its roots were considerably blacker than we think. Look at Jimmie Rodgers, for example, another artist in that first Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame class. When Ray Charles started doing Country music, he not only pointed to that past, he also said, Here’s what whiteness integrated into blackness sounds like. Usually it’s color having to assimilate, to lose its darker tones to become acceptable enough to white society. James Baldwin called this loss “The price of the ticket,” the price of being accepted. Historically, whites made money by taking black music and dumbing it down. That’s the meaning of the final scenes of the 2020 movie Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, where we see a white band doing the music of the central character Levee, played by Chadwick Boseman in his final role. (He deserves a posthumous Oscar for it.) Levee’s been paid a pittance for his songs. They’ve been stolen. Ray Charles reverses that flow. He’s so different from anyone else on Ray Charles Radio not only because he stays closer to blues and Gospel and jazz, but also because he’s assimilated white music into those roots as well.
♦ Go to All Things Ray for an index of all Ray Charles material on this site, including a 5-part video lecture: “Me and Brother Ray.” All Things Baldwin functions similarly for James Baldwin, and in my sermon “Pentecost Means No Supremacies” I use Baldwin’s “Price of the ticket” idea.
♦ Go to a list of Reviews and to the Teaching Diversity main page.